"If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the
animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel
nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest
lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen."
Samuel Adams, (1722-1803)

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

May 1st, International Workers' Day, commemorates the historic struggle of working people throughout the world, and is recognized in every country except the United States and Canada. This despite the fact that the holiday began in the 1880s in the United States, with the fight for an eight-hour work day.

In 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions passed a resolution stating that eight hours would constitute a legal day's work from and after May 1, 1886. The resolution called for a general strike to achieve the goal, since legislative methods had already failed. With workers being forced to work ten, twelve, and fourteen hours a day, rank-and-file support for the eight-hour movement grew rapidly, despite the indifference and hostility of many union leaders. By April 1886, 250,000 workers were involved in the May Day movement.

The heart of the movement was in Chicago, organized primarily by the anarchist International Working People's Association. Businesses and the state were terrified by the increasingly revolutionary character of the movement and prepared accordingly. The police and militia were increased in size and received new and powerful weapons financed by local business leaders. Chicago's Commercial Club purchased a $2000 machine gun for the Illinois National Guard to be used against strikers. Nevertheless, by May 1st, the movement had already won gains for many Chicago clothing cutters, shoemakers, and packing-house workers. But on May 3, 1886, police fired into a crowd of strikers at the McCormick Reaper Works Factory, killing four and wounding many. Anarchists called for a mass meeting the next day in Haymarket Square to protest the brutality.

The meeting proceeded without incident, and by the time the last speaker was on the platform, the rainy gathering was already breaking up, with only a few hundred people remaining. It was then that 180 cops marched into the square and ordered the meeting to disperse. As the speakers climbed down from the platform, a bomb was thrown at the police, killing one and injuring seventy. Police responded by firing into the crowd, killing one worker and injuring many others.

Although it was never determined who threw the bomb, the incident was used as an excuse to attack the entire Left and labor movement. Police ransacked the homes and offices of suspected radicals, and hundreds were arrested without charge. Anarchists in particular were harassed, and eight of Chicago's most active were charged with conspiracy to murder in connection with the Haymarket bombing. A kangaroo court found all eight guilty, despite a lack of evidence connecting any of them to the bomb-thrower (only one was even present at the meeting, and he was on the speakers' platform), and they were sentenced to die. Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolf Fischer, and George Engel were hanged on November 11, 1887. Louis Lingg committed suicide in prison. The remaining three were finally pardoned in 1893.

It is not surprising that the state, business leaders, mainstream union officials, and the media would want to hide the true history of May Day, portraying it as a holiday celebrated only in Moscow's Red Square. In its attempt to erase the history and significance of May Day, the United States government declared May 1st to be "Law Day", and gave us instead "Labor Day­" -a holiday devoid of any historical significance other than its importance as a day to swill beer and sit in traffic jams.

But rather than suppressing labor and radical movements, the events of 1886 and the execution of the Chicago anarchists actually mobilized many generations of radicals. Emma Goldman, a young immigrant at the time, later pointed to the Haymarket affair as her political birth. Lucy Parsons, widow of Albert Parsons, called upon the poor to direct their anger toward those responsible--the rich. Instead of disappearing, the anarchist movement only grew in the wake of Haymarket, spawning other radical movements and organizations, including the Industrial Workers of the World.

By covering up the history of May Day, the state, business, mainstream unions and the media have covered up an entire legacy of dissent in this country. They are terrified of what a similarly militant and organized movement could accomplish today, and they suppress the seeds of such organization whenever and wherever they can. As workers, we must recognize and commemorate May Day not only for its historical significance, but also as a time to organize around issues of vital importance to working-class people today.

As IWW songwriter Joe Hill wrote in one of his most powerful songs:

"Workers of the world, awaken! Rise in all your splendid might Take the wealth that you are making, It belongs to you by right. No one will for bread be crying We'll have freedom, love and health, When the grand red flag is flying In the Workers' Commonwealth."

Who profits from the Iraq war? More than a quarter of senators and congressmen have invested at least $196 million of their own money in companies doing business with the Department of Defense (DoD) that profit from the death and destruction in Iraq.

According to the latest reports, 151 members of Congress invested close to a quarter-billion in companies that received defense contracts of at least $5 million in 2006. These companies got more than $275.6 billion from the government in 2006, or $755 million per day, according to FedSpending.org, a website of the watchdog group OMBWatch.

Congressmen gave themselves a loophole so they only have to report their assets in broad ranges. Thus, they can be off as much as 160 percent. (Try giving the IRS an estimate like that.) In 2004, the first full year after the present Iraq war began, Republican and Democratic lawmakers—both hawks and doves—invested between $74.9 million and $161.3 million in companies under contract with the DoD. In 2006 Democrats had at least $3.7 million invested in the defense sector alone, compared to the Republicans’ “only” $577,500. As the war raged on, so did the billions of profits—and personal investments by Congress members in war contractors, which increased 5 percent from 2004 to 2006.

Investments in these contractors yielded Congress members between $15.8 million and $62 million in personal income from 2004 through 2006, through dividends, capital gains, royalties and interest. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), who are two of Congress’s wealthiest members, were among the lawmakers who garnered the most income from war contractors between 2004 and 2006: Sensenbrenner got at least $3.2 million and Kerry reaped at least $2.6 million.

Members of the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees which oversee the Iraq war had between $32 million and $44 million invested in companies with DoD contracts.

War hawk Sen. Joe Lieberman (IConn.), chairman of the defense-relatedSenate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, had at least $51,000 invested in these companies in 2006.

Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), who voted for Bush’s war, had stock in defense companies, such as Honeywell, Boeing and Raytheon, but sold the stock in May 2007.

Of the 151 members whose investments are tied to the “defense” (war)industry, as far as we know, not one of them offered to donate their bloodstained profits to the national treasury to offset the terrible debt they have imposed. Has one of them even offered to donate one cent of their war profits to lessen the debt that increases more than $1 million a minute?

When our boys and girls are wounded the government bills them to return their reenlistment bonus. They have to return any pay they received while they were hospitalized. They have to pay for their helmets and uniforms that are destroyed in the hell of war. But they keep on fighting for these politicians’ right to keep their war profits.

Politico's Simon cropped Wright quote, claiming he "made it legitimate" to use Obama's middle name In writing that Rev. Jeremiah Wright "made it legitimate" to use Sen. Barack Obama's middle name, the Politico's Roger Simon selectively quoted Wright saying at an NAACP dinner, "Please run and tell my stuck-on-stupid friends that Arabic is a language; it's not a religion. Barack Hussein Obama. Barack Hussein Obama. Barack Hussein Obama." Simon omitted the portion of Wright's remarks that immediately followed the part he quoted, in which Wright appeared to criticize those who use Obama's middle name. Read More

Politico uncritically described NRCC ad's reference to National Journal's flawed ranking of Obama Reporting on advertising buys by the National Republican Congressional Committee "and GOP allies," the Politico's Josh Kraushaar cited an ad that refers to Sen. Barack Obama's "ranking by National Journal as having 'the most liberal voting record in the U.S. Senate.' " But Kraushaar did not mention that a respected, comprehensive vote study contradicts the National Journal's ratings, which were based on "99 key Senate votes" selected by Journal staff members. Read More

CNN's Bash again airs clip of McCain falsely attacking Dems for health care proposals On The Situation Room, Dana Bash uncritically aired a clip of Sen. John McCain saying of health care plans put forward by Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama: "This will accomplish one thing only. We will replace the inefficiency, irrationality, and uncontrolled costs of the current system with the inefficiency, irrationality, and uncontrolled costs of a government monopoly." In fact, neither Clinton nor Obama has proposed a "government monopoly" on insurance coverage; rather, both have called for individuals to choose their own insurance. Read More

It seems the AP has fallen for the McCain campaign's and the RNC's effort to prevent anyone from using McCain's own words against him during the 2008 presidential campaign. As noted earlier, what the McCain campaign is pushing for here is a standard in which any negative ad targeting McCain must be delivered with the McCain camp's own spin included in order to be within bounds -- a standard few politicians, to say the least, have ever been granted. And even though the political press has been highly indulgent of the McCain campaign on this issue, I don't think I've seen any news organization so egregiously buy into McCain's false statements as the Associated Press.

The AP article lede reads: "The Republican National Committee demanded Monday that television networks stop running a television ad by the Democratic Party that falsely suggests John McCain wants a 100-year war in Iraq." So, as you can see, the AP begins by stating as fact the McCain camp's claim that the ad is false. Then it actually directly misstates what the ad says.

As you'll remember, there was some jousting a few weeks back over whether it was accurate to say that McCain is willing to continue the 'war' in Iraq for 50 or 100 years. This is because McCain adds the caveat that it's fine with him because he thinks that the occupation will soon be like our longstanding presence in Germany, Japan and Korea in which we have a substantial troop presence but no soldiers dying in hostile action since the population and governments are content to have us there. So is it really 'war' or only 'occupation' or 'presence'?

The truth is that McCain's wishful thinking doesn't change the fact that he's saying he's happy to have US troops stay in Iraq essentially forever (a century, in political terms, is essentially forever), something very few Americans think makes any sense. But the ad doesn't even get into this question of definitions or McCain's special pleading about whether it's 'war' or 'occupation' or 'presence' or whatever. The ad literally just has McCain speaking in his own voice....

In a speech to newspaper editors earlier this month, senator Hillary Clinton denounced the "imperial presidency" of George Bush and promised to pursue a different course if she becomes president.

But that promise is hardly more believable than her claims to have dodged sniper fire in Bosnia.

Clinton's primary case for her candidacy is her White House experience during the presidency of her husband. And those years were marked by expansions of federal and executive power, secrecy and claims of executive privilege.

In her campaign she says that she would "restore the checks and balances and the separation of powers". But back in 2003, she told ABC's George Stephanopoulos: "I'm a strong believer in executive authority. I wish that, when my husband was president, people in Congress had been more willing to recognise presidential authority." She encouraged President Clinton to intervene in Haiti and Bosnia and to bomb Serbia, all without congressional authorisation.

In the case of the bombing of Serbia, Congress actually took a vote. The House of Representatives refused to authorise the air strikes, but the Clinton administration "sort of just blew by" that technicality, in the words of a White House spokesman.

President Clinton also ordered air strikes on Afghanistan, Sudan and Iraq, all without congressional approval. That's practically the definition of an imperial president, and it sharply undermines Hillary Clinton's statement in this campaign that "I do not believe that the president can take military action - including any kind of strategic bombing - against Iran without congressional authorisation.".........

INDIANAPOLIS — Hillary Clinton loves to tell the story about how the Chinese government bought a good American company in Indiana, laid off all its workers and moved its critical defense technology work to China.

It’s a story with a dramatic, political ending. Republican President George W. Bush could have stopped it, but he didn’t.

If she were president, Clinton says, she’d fight to protect those jobs. It’s just the kind of talk that’s helping her win support from working-class Democrats worried about their jobs and paychecks, not to mention their country’s security.

What Clinton never includes in the oft-repeated tale is the role that prominent Democrats played in selling the company and its technology to the Chinese. She never mentions that big-time Democratic contributor George Soros helped put together the deal to sell the company or that the sale was approved by her husband's administration.

In response, the Clinton campaign said that Bill Clinton's administration had gotten assurances at the time it approved the deal that production would remain inside the United States, and that the shift of jobs to China didn't occur until under the Bush administration.

“Hillary Clinton must have been hoping we Hoosiers have short memories,” Ed Dixon of Valparaiso said in a letter to a local newspaper after a recent Clinton visit. “Her husband was president at the time and allowed this to happen.”

“They would have us believe Bush was behind this sale,” added Fred Sliger of Valparaiso in another letter, “when in fact the Clinton administration rubber-stamped this along with the sale of numerous other high-tech secrets to the Chinese. …Let's get the facts straight.”

In an interview, Sliger amplified his view. "She blamed President Bush. I blame him, too, but she neglects to mention that it all started when her husband was in office," said Sliger, a mechanic at Valparaiso University. "They say those jobs went out the back door on Bush's watch. They wouldn't have gone out the back door if President Clinton hadn’t left the front door propped open. I blame everybody. I want the blame to go around." Dixon also elaborated in an interview. "She brought it up at a town hall meeting here," said Dixon, a computer network administrator from Valparaiso and a Barack Obama supporter...........

I’ve been on the road (actually doing a public dialog with Barney Frank on financial reform), so I’m just catching up. Anyway, John McCain has a really bad idea on gasoline, Hillary Clinton is emulating him (but with a twist that makes her plan pointless rather than evil), and Barack Obama, to his credit, says no.

Why doesn’t cutting the gas tax this summer make sense? It’s Econ 101 tax incidence theory: if the supply of a good is more or less unresponsive to the price, the price to consumers will always rise until the quantity demanded falls to match the quantity supplied. Cut taxes, and all that happens is that the pretax price rises by the same amount. The McCain gas tax plan is a giveaway to oil companies, disguised as a gift to consumers.

Is the supply of gasoline really fixed? For this coming summer, it is. Refineries normally run flat out in the summer, the season of peak driving. Any elasticity in the supply comes earlier in the year, when refiners decide how much to put in inventories. The McCain/Clinton gas tax proposal comes too late for that. So it’s Econ 101: the tax cut really goes to the oil companies.

The Clinton twist is that she proposes paying for the revenue loss with an excess profits tax on oil companies. In one pocket, out the other. So it’s pointless, not evil. But it is pointless, and disappointing...........

A man who spent more than 27 years in prison has been cleared of a 1980 murder and is expected to be released as soon as Tuesday. He would be the nation’s longest-serving person who had been exonerated by DNA testing after a wrongful conviction, his lawyers said. The inmate, James Lee Woodard, 55, of Dallas, was jailed in January 1981 and sentenced to life in prison in July 1981 for the murder of a Dallas woman found sexually assaulted and strangled near the Trinity River in 1980.

Iranian President Ahmadinejad says the White House hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are unlikely to win the US presidential election, PressTV reported.

"We don't interfere in the other countries' affairs but we think that the American nation seek profound changes in their country," the Iranian president said in a press conference in New Delhi on Tuesday when he was asked about the prospective results of the US presidential campaign.

"Do you think a black candidate would be allowed to be the president in the US? We don't think Mr. Obama will be allowed to become the US president," Mehr news agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying.

Pointing to Clinton's chance of winning the presidential election, he said, "Presidency of a woman in a country that boasts its gunmanship is unlikely."

"I think the US presidential campaign is being steered towards a determined direction," Ahmadinejad argued.

However, the Iranian president stated, "It will make no difference to us who will be the next US president. Whatever happens the US is not like the past and its power is on decline."

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

The United States has done itself no favours by the way it has handled its revelations about Syria’s purported covert nuclear weapons programme. It was always going to be vulnerable to charges that it had cried wolf once, in Iraq, only to find its intelligence lethally wrong. But in making claims about Syria’s secret efforts to build a bomb with North Korean help, it has asked the world to take too much on faith and left itself open to every charge of bending intelligence to fit the politics.

The accusations have been simmering for weeks – and in a low-key way, for seven months, since Israel bombed a Syrian site without much explanation. But they were brought into the open on Monday evening by Michael Hayden, the CIA Director, who said that the alleged Syrian reactor destroyed by the Israeli raid would have produced enough plutonium for one or two bombs within a year of becoming operational.

The US must be braced for critics to say that they have heard this kind of thing before. It is not just the American and British assertions about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. But the continuing struggle to persuade Iran to drop its nuclear ambitions produces a steady fountain of such prophesies: how many years until it can make enriched uranium, how many more until it gets a bomb, how many more bombs per year. And so on.

No surprise that the US has been criticised by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN nuclear watchdog, for failing to disclose the information earlier. The relationship between the two is hardly neutral, as the IAEA, under its Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei, has challenged the American approach to the Iranian problem and has appeared more accommodating of Tehran’s explanations. But the IAEA is on solid ground this time: one of its jobs is to try to detect the illicit use of nuclear material, and it cannot do that if its members withhold intelligence vital to that work ...

Politico's Allen misrepresented Obama's April 16 debate response on "disown[ing]" Wright comments Reporting on a speech by Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., Sen. Barack Obama's former pastor, Politico's Mike Allen misrepresented Obama's April 16 debate response on "disown[ing]" Wright's controversial remarks by writing, "Obama referred to Wright as 'somebody who is associated with me that I have disowned,' then clarified that to say he had disowned the comments." Allen left out the first part of Obama's sentence: "[T]he notion that somehow that the American people are going to be distracted once again by comments not made by me but somebody who is associated with me that I have disowned, I think doesn't give the American people enough credit." Read More

Olbermann named NPR's Rudin "Worst Person" for comparing Clinton to Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction On Countdown, Keith Olbermann named Ken Rudin the "winner" of his nightly "Worst Person in the World" segment for asserting: "[F]irst of all, let's be honest here, [Sen.] Hillary Clinton is Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. She's going to keep coming back, and they're not going to stop her." Olbermann commented: "[A]fter comparing Senator Clinton to the insane, murderous, kidnapping, stalking, knife-wielding, suicidal, bunny-boiling character of Alex Forrest, who has to be drowned and shot to be finally stopped in Fatal Attraction, even the harshest critic of Senator Clinton is probably beginning to think, you know, that might be a little harsh. Maybe an apology is in order." Read More

Drudge further distorted Hill article that itself made misleading comparison regarding Clinton's reported earmark request The Hill made a misleading comparison between the amount in earmarks reportedly requested by Sen. Hillary Clinton for 2009 and the amount secured by other senators for the 2008 fiscal year in reporting that Clinton "has requested nearly $2.3 billion in federal earmarks for 2009, almost three times the largest amount received by a single senator this year." The Hill did not report which senator had requested the most in earmarks for 2009 -- presumably because senators are not required to make their earmark requests public, a detail not noted until the 22nd paragraph of the Hill article. The Drudge Report further distorted the Hill article to falsely claim: "Clinton requests $2.3B in earmarks -- three times largest amount ever by Senator!" Read More

Matthews conflated Wright and Obama, then said they are "different faces of the same guy" On Hardball, Chris Matthews likened the relationship between Sen. Barack Obama and his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, to "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" and asserted: [E]very time you have a problem with Barack, because you don't really know him and he seems a little foreign to you, you think of -- you think of him as both these guys. They're different faces of the same guy. Jeremiah Wright, to a lot of people, is Barack Obama." Read More

CNN continues trend of uncritically airing McCain's false attacks on Dems' health care plans CNN's Dana Bash, Wolf Blitzer, and Kyra Phillips all uncritically aired video of Sen. John McCain's false attacks on Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton regarding health care, in which McCain suggested that the Democratic candidates favor a "one-size-fits-all, big-government takeover of health care," and that "[t]hey want the government to make the decisions." In fact, neither Obama nor Clinton has proposed a "big-government takeover of health care"; both have called for individuals to choose their own insurance. Read More

Yesterday I heard Geoffrey Garin, Hillary's new strategist, on MSNBC, using the Rev. Wright controversy to question whether Obama is out of touch. (The link's not up yet, or I'd quote him). He made similar comments in the Times re Pennsylvania voters.

I knew Garin in college more than 30 years ago when we worked at the Harvard Crimson newspaper. He was a special guy--softspoken, funny, brilliant. He was also a radical. In 1973, on an anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, Garin called for violent revolution in the United States:

To commemorate the symbolic significance of the Tea party without acknowledging the significance of the commitment to violence is to miss the point altogether. Boston did not win its "Cradle of Liberty" name because of a special intellectual quality of its leaders but because of a special leaders were willing to resort to violence under conditions they thought to be oppressive... Samuel Adams and the South End Mob were the first to understand Tom Paine's admonition, "Moderation in principle is always a vice."

...America and much of the world is living dangerously close to oppression. ... Whether Americans will soon become steadfast in their resistance to oppression depends on their coming to understand what resistance is all about. The way we celebrate the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party will gauge the depth of that understanding....Freedom is on the wane in this country and repression is on the rise all over the world. We can no longer sit back and swap stories about the good old revolution. We have to start worrying about the present. On this anniversary we must recognize that the patriots of Boston acted wisely in overthrowing their oppressors and the time is come to express our confidence in what our forefathers did by doing it ourselves.

Here, following Agnew's resignation in 1973, he says that the government will fall, and again spoke of revolution:

The government in Washington can not survive under these circumstances, and under these circumstances the government should not survive.... America will be governed in any case, but the question is by whom. If not by the people, then by a strong executive. These are revolutionary times, and we must decide now whom we want to win the revolution.

Yes, Geoff Garin was 20 years old when he wrote these pieces. (A mature 20, I must say). I'm sure he stopped calling for revolution after college, probably because he grew out of the ideas-- maybe too because you can't make a living as a leftist. But I knew Garin well enough to be sure that his political impulses, ones of fairness, respect for oppressed peoples, live on somewhere in his thinking to this day. Those impulses once made him call for violent revolution.

It is helpful to read his writings because they demonstrate: how much people grow, how common revolutionary statements have been in the left (even in the Jewish meritocracy, of which Garin and I are members). But mostly because they show that the continuum of left-center ideas, which are now coming back into American life, includes Wright, Garin, and Obama.

I will be "looping," to use Rev. Wright's words, more of Garin's firebrand writings later.

Any job applicant knows that background checks are routine – especially for jobs involving authority or oversight of money. So why didn’t the San Diego Republican Party do a simple Google search before naming Tony Krvaric as its chairman?

Online research reveals that Krvaric is the co-founder of Fairlight, a band of software crackers which later evolved into an international video and software piracy group that law enforcement authorities say is among the world’s largest such crime rings. After co-founding Fairlight in Sweden, Krvaric established U.S. operations for the organization, including an arm headquartered in Southern California—a major center for the computer and video game industry.

Krvaric has also been appointed by California Republican Party Chairman Ron Nehring to head up the state party’s budget committee. RAW STORY's investigation reveals the California GOP has put an alleged pirate in charge of its treasure trove.

An e-mail sent anonymously this week to a conservative listserv operator in San Diego County revealed an attached document titled “The Secret Life of Tony Krvaric.” The attachment alleged that Krvaric, using the alias “Strider,” founded Fairlight “to illegally crack and distribute copyrighted software.” Fairlight evolved from “an adolescent obsession into a full fledged multinational criminal enterprise,” the e-mail claimed.

These allegations come as no surprise to RAW STORY, which has been researching Krvaric’s ties to Fairlight for some time....

It took more time than it should have, but on Tuesday Barack Obama firmly rejected the racism and paranoia of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., and he made it clear that the preacher does not represent him, his politics or his campaign.

Senator Obama has had to struggle to explain this relationship ever since a video surfaced of Mr. Wright damning the United States from his pulpit. Last month, Mr. Obama delivered a speech in which he said he disapproved of Mr. Wright’s racially charged comments but said that the pastor still played an important role in his spiritual life.

It was a distinction we were not sure would sit well with many voters. But what mattered more was the speech’s powerful commentary on the state of race relations in this country. We hoped it would open the door to a serious, healthy and much-needed discussion on race.

Mr. Wright has not let that happen. In the last few days, in a series of shocking appearances, he embraced the Rev. Louis Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism. He said the government manufactured the AIDS virus to kill blacks. He suggested that America was guilty of “terrorism” and so had brought the 9/11 attacks on itself.

This could not be handled by a speech about the complexities of modern life. It required a powerful, unambiguous denunciation — and Mr. Obama gave it. He said his former pastor’s “rants” were “appalling.” “They offend me,” he said. “They rightly offend all Americans. And they should be denounced. And that’s what I’m doing very clearly and unequivocally here today.”

He said he was angry that Mr. Wright suggested that he was insincere when he previously criticized the pastor’s views. “If Reverend Wright thinks that that’s political posturing, as he put it, then he doesn’t know me very well,” Mr. Obama said. “And based on his remarks yesterday, well, I may not know him as well as I thought either.”

In March, Mr. Obama tried to walk a fine line — seeking to dispel any sense of a political relationship with Mr. Wright, while trying to preserve a personal tie that was clearly important to his religious development. On Tuesday, he abandoned that.

“I want to use this press conference to make people absolutely clear that obviously whatever relationship I had with Reverend Wright has changed as a consequence of this,” he said, adding that if Mr. Wright speaks out again, he will not represent the Obama campaign.

It was the most forthright repudiation of an out-of-control supporter that we can remember. We would like to say that it will finally take the racial charge out of this campaign. We’re not that naïve.

It is an injustice, a legacy of the racist threads of this nation’s history, but prominent African-Americans are regularly called upon to explain or repudiate what other black Americans have to say, while white public figures are rarely, if ever, handed that burden.

Senator John McCain has continued to embrace a prominent white supporter, Pastor John Hagee, whose bigotry matches that of Mr. Wright. Mr. McCain has not tried hard enough to stop a race-baiting commercial — complete with video of Mr. Wright — that is being run against Mr. Obama in North Carolina.

If Mr. Obama is the Democratic presidential nominee, we fear that there will be many more such commercials. And Mr. Obama will have to repudiate Mr. Wright’s outbursts many more times.

This country needs a healthy and open discussion of race. Mr. Obama’s repudiation of Mr. Wright is part of that. His opponents also have a responsibility — to repudiate the race-baiting and make sure it stops.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) has requested nearly $2.3 billion in federal earmarks for 2009, almost three times the largest amount received by a single senator this year.

Clinton’s huge earmark requests have some speculating that the former first lady is preparing for a soft landing should she lose the Democratic primary to Obama and refocus her energy on winning a third Senate term.

Kevin Ring was exuberant. It was Feb. 4, 2002, and Ring, a young member of Jack Abramoff's lobbying team at Greenberg Traurig, was laying plans to attend a Dave Matthews Band concert at the MCI Center. It was to be a celebration.

"I have the suite filling up with DOJ staffers that just got our clients $16 million," he gushed in an e-mail to his colleague, Padgett Wilson. "Come to the show, baby."

"Are there any tickets left?" asked Wilson, now director of governmental affairs for Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue (R). He then submitted: "And as for those DOJ staffers, those guys should get anything they want for the rest of the time they are in office - opening day tickets, Skins v. Giants, oriental massages, hookers, whatever."

Last week, one of those staffers, Robert Coughlin II, 36, pleaded guilty to criminal conflict of interest, becoming the first Justice Department official charged in the 4-year-old influence-peddling investigation.

But court documents filed in Coughlin's case and e-mails released through congressional investigations are explicit about Team Abramoff's line into the Justice Department: Coughlin was but one of many "friendlies," as they are identified in Coughlin's statement of offense.

A source familiar with the Abramoff probe says the Justice Department is continuing to investigate other former Justice officials. Coughlin and at least two other unnamed Justice officials helped secure a $16.3 million grant for Ring's client, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, court documents say. A deputy assistant attorney general had previously approved $9 million for the tribe. One unanswered question is which official at the department overruled that decision, giving the tribe the full amount............

QUITO, April 28 (Xinhua) -- The Ecuadorian government Monday asked the Colombian government to hand over evidence about the alleged wealth accumulated by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in Ecuador, local media reported.

"Colombia is obliged to give Ecuador the information about that fact, as suggested by (Colombian) President Alvaro Uribe," Miguel Carvajal, Ecuador's Deputy Defense Minister, said during an interview with a local television network.

"Its obligation is to give us that information to carry out investigations and enforce the law, because illicit activities in Ecuador cannot be tolerated," Carvajal said.

.....

Carvajal said that beyond Uribe's unproved accusations, he also could not understand how Colombia has not been able "to control irregular groups nor trafficking of cocaine" despite its big military budget and the support from the United States.......

Monday, April 28, 2008

O'Reilly again misrepresented prior comments about terrorists attacking San Francisco Bill O'Reilly again misrepresented comments he made in 2005 about a possible terrorist attack on San Francisco, stating on his Fox News show: "I made a joke out of San Francisco. If they didn't want the military, then the next time there was a terror attack, they're on their own." In fact, O'Reilly had said: "[I]f Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead." Read More

Hannity failed to challenge suggestion that Obama has not "condemn[ed] the actions" of Ayers On Hannity's America, discussing what host Sean Hannity said was Sen. Barack Obama's "friendly relationship" with Weather Underground member William Ayers, retired New York City Police detective Paul Ragonese, who survived a 1970 bombing attack by the Weather Underground, stated, "I can't understand why somebody who wants to be president of the United States, I'll be perfectly honest with you, would want to associate or not condemn the actions of people in the past." Hannity did not note that, in fact, Obama has condemned Ayers' "detestable acts." Read More

Wash. Post uncritically quoted NC voter's assertion that Obama "will refuse to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance" if elected presidentThe Washington Post uncritically quoted a voter's assertion -- apparently referring to a chain email containing a photograph of Sen. Barack Obama standing, but without his hand over his heart -- that "[f]rom what I can tell, if he becomes president he will refuse to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance." However, Post "fact checker" Michael Dobbs previously noted that "[c]ontrary to the e-mails attacking Obama for disrespecting the flag, the candidates were not reciting the pledge of allegiance. They were standing for the national anthem." Indeed, other photos show Obama with his hand over his heart during the national anthem. Read More

Media continue to ignore McCain's flip-flop on Iraq-Korea comparison In reporting on the Democratic National Committee's ad highlighting Sen. John McCain's statement that the U.S. might be in Iraq for "a hundred" years, the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and the Tribune Co.'s Washington bureau all reported that McCain indicated that the extended involvement in Iraq that he was referring to would be similar to the presence the U.S. has had in South Korea. But they did not report that McCain has previously dismissed the idea of a Korea-like U.S. troop presence in Iraq. Read More

CNN's Bash, Roberts, and Phillips ignored Hagee's comments linking Hurricane Katrina to gay pride parade Reporting on a New Orleans campaign event at which Sen. John McCain's "carefully scripted imagery was interrupted by a voter's question about Pastor John Hagee," CNN's Dana Bash aired a clip of Hagee -- who has endorsed McCain -- saying of Hurricane Katrina, "What happened in New Orleans looked like the curse of God." But Bash did not air the portion of Hagee's comments in which he reaffirmed his previous assertion that Hurricane Katrina was at least in part the result of "sin" that Hagee identified as "a massive homosexual rally." CNN's John Roberts and Kyra Phillips similarly noted that Hagee said that "Katrina was God's punishment for sinful behavior in New Orleans" without mentioning that among the "sinful behavior" Hagee referenced was the gay pride parade. Read More

The military adventurers in the Bush administration have much in common with the corporate leaders of the defunct energy company Enron. Both groups thought that they were the "smartest guys in the room" -- the title of Alex Gibney's prize-winning film on what went wrong at Enron. The neoconservatives in the White House and the Pentagon outsmarted themselves. They failed even to address the problem of how to finance their schemes of imperialist wars and global domination.

As a result, going into 2008, the United States finds itself in the anomalous position of being unable to pay for its own elevated living standards or its wasteful, overly large military establishment. Its government no longer even attempts to reduce the ruinous expenses of maintaining huge standing armies, replacing the equipment that seven years of wars have destroyed or worn out, or preparing for a war in outer space against unknown adversaries. Instead, the Bush administration puts off these costs for future generations to pay or repudiate. This fiscal irresponsibility has been disguised through many manipulative financial schemes (causing poorer countries to lend us unprecedented sums of money), but the time of reckoning is fast approaching.

There are three broad aspects to the U.S. debt crisis. First, in the current fiscal year (2008) we are spending insane amounts of money on "defense" projects that bear no relation to the national security of the U.S. We are also keeping the income tax burdens on the richest segment of the population at strikingly low levels.

Second, we continue to believe that we can compensate for the accelerating erosion of our base and our loss of jobs to foreign countries through massive military expenditures -- "military Keynesianism" (which I discuss in detail in my book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic). By that, I mean the mistaken belief that public policies focused on frequent wars, huge expenditures on weapons and munitions, and large standing armies can indefinitely sustain a wealthy capitalist economy. The opposite is actually true.

Third, in our devotion to militarism (despite our limited resources), we are failing to invest in our social infrastructure and other requirements for the long-term health of the U.S. These are what economists call opportunity costs, things not done because we spent our money on something else. Our public education system has deteriorated alarmingly. We have failed to provide health care to all our citizens and neglected our responsibilities as the world's number one polluter. Most important, we have lost our competitiveness as a manufacturer for civilian needs, an infinitely more efficient use of scarce resources than arms manufacturing.

Fiscal disaster

It is virtually impossible to overstate the profligacy of what our government spends on the military. The Department of Defense's planned expenditures for the fiscal year 2008 are larger than all other nations' military budgets combined. The supplementary budget to pay for the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not part of the official defense budget, is itself larger than the combined military budgets of Russia and China. Defense-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history. The U.S. has become the largest single seller of arms and munitions to other nations on Earth. Leaving out President Bush's two on-going wars, defense spending has doubled since the mid-1990s. The defense budget for fiscal 2008 is the largest since the second world war.

Before we try to break down and analyze this gargantuan sum, there is one important caveat. Figures on defense spending are notoriously unreliable. The numbers released by the Congressional Reference Service and the Congressional Budget Office do not agree with each other. Robert Higgs, senior fellow for political economy at the Independent Institute, says: "A well-founded rule of thumb is to take the Pentagon's (always well publicized) basic budget total and double it." Even a cursory reading of newspaper articles about the Department of Defense will turn up major differences in statistics about its expenses. Some 30-40% of the defense budget is 'black,'" meaning that these sections contain hidden expenditures for classified projects. There is no possible way to know what they include or whether their total amounts are accurate.

There are many reasons for this budgetary sleight-of-hand -- including a desire for secrecy on the part of the president, the secretary of defense, and the military-industrial complex -- but the chief one is that members of Congress, who profit enormously from defense jobs and pork-barrel projects in their districts, have a political interest in supporting the Department of Defense. In 1996, in an attempt to bring accounting standards within the executive branch closer to those of the civilian economy, Congress passed the Federal Financial Management Improvement Act. It required all federal agencies to hire outside auditors to review their books and release the results to the public. Neither the Department of Defense, nor the Department of Homeland Security, has ever complied. Congress has complained, but not penalized either department for ignoring the law. All numbers released by the Pentagon should be regarded as suspect.

In discussing the fiscal 2008 defense budget, as released on 7 February 2007, I have been guided by two experienced and reliable analysts: William D Hartung of the New America Foundation's Arms and Security Initiative and Fred Kaplan, defense correspondent for Slate.org. They agree that the Department of Defense requested $481.4bn for salaries, operations (except in Iraq and Afghanistan), and equipment. They also agree on a figure of $141.7bn for the "supplemental" budget to fight the global war on terrorism -- that is, the two on-going wars that the general public may think are actually covered by the basic Pentagon budget. The Department of Defense also asked for an extra $93.4bn to pay for hitherto unmentioned war costs in the remainder of 2007 and, most creatively, an additional "allowance" (a new term in defense budget documents) of $50bn to be charged to fiscal year 2009. This makes a total spending request by the Department of Defense of $766.5bn.

But there is much more. In an attempt to disguise the true size of the U.S. military empire, the government has long hidden major military-related expenditures in departments other than Defense. For example, $23.4bn for the Department of Energy goes towards developing and maintaining nuclear warheads; and $25.3bn in the Department of State budget is spent on foreign military assistance (primarily for Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Republic, Egypt and Pakistan). Another $1.03bn outside the official Department of Defense budget is now needed for recruitment and re-enlistment incentives for the overstretched U.S. military, up from a mere $174m in 2003, when the war in Iraq began. The Department of Veterans Affairs currently gets at least $75.7bn, 50% of it for the long-term care of the most seriously injured among the 28,870 soldiers so far wounded in Iraq and 1,708 in Afghanistan. The amount is universally derided as inadequate. Another $46.4bn goes to the Department of Homeland Security.

Missing from this compilation is $1.9bn to the Department of Justice for the paramilitary activities of the FBI; $38.5bn to the Department of the Treasury for the Military Retirement Fund; $7.6bn for the military-related activities of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; and well over $200bn in interest for past debt-financed defense outlays. This brings U.S. spending for its military establishment during the current fiscal year, conservatively calculated, to at least $1.1 trillion.

Military Keynesianism

Such expenditures are not only morally obscene, they are fiscally unsustainable. Many neo-conservatives and poorly informed patriotic Americans believe that, even though our defense budget is huge, we can afford it because we are the richest country on Earth. That statement is no longer true. The world's richest political entity, according to the CIA's World Factbook, is the European Union. The E.U.'s 2006 GDP was estimated to be slightly larger than that of the U.S. Moreover, China's 2006 GDP was only slightly smaller than that of the U.S., and Japan was the world's fourth richest nation.

A more telling comparison that reveals just how much worse we're doing can be found among the current accounts of various nations. The current account measures the net trade surplus or deficit of a country plus cross-border payments of interest, royalties, dividends, capital gains, foreign aid, and other income. In order for Japan to manufacture anything, it must import all required raw materials. Even after this incredible expense is met, it still has an $88bn per year trade surplus with the U.S. and enjoys the world's second highest current account balance (China is number one). The U.S. is number 163 -- last on the list, worse than countries such as Australia and the U.K. that also have large trade deficits. Its 2006 current account deficit was $811.5bn; second worst was Spain at $106.4bn. This is unsustainable.

It's not just that our tastes for foreign goods, including imported oil, vastly exceed our ability to pay for them. We are financing them through massive borrowing. On 7 November 2007, the U.S. Treasury announced that the national debt had breached $9 trillion for the first time. This was just five weeks after Congress raised the "debt ceiling" to $9.815 trillion. If you begin in 1789, at the moment the constitution became the supreme law of the land, the debt accumulated by the federal government did not top $1 trillion until 1981. When George Bush became president in January 2001, it stood at approximately $5.7 trillion. Since then, it has increased by 45%. This huge debt can be largely explained by our defense expenditures.

The top spenders

The world's top 10 military spenders and the approximate amounts each currently budgets for its military establishment are:

Our excessive military expenditures did not occur over just a few short years or simply because of the Bush administration's policies. They have been going on for a very long time in accordance with a superficially plausible ideology, and have now become so entrenched in our democratic political system that they are starting to wreak havoc. This is military Keynesianism -- the determination to maintain a permanent war economy and to treat military output as an ordinary economic product, even though it makes no contribution to either production or consumption.

This ideology goes back to the first years of the cold war. During the late 1940s, the U.S. was haunted by economic anxieties. The great depression of the 1930s had been overcome only by the war production boom of the second world war. With peace and demobilization, there was a pervasive fear that the depression would return. During 1949, alarmed by the Soviet Union's detonation of an atomic bomb, the looming Communist victory in the Chinese civil war, a domestic recession, and the lowering of the Iron Curtain around the USSR's European satellites, the U.S. sought to draft basic strategy for the emerging cold war. The result was the militaristic National Security Council Report 68 (NSC-68) drafted under the supervision of Paul Nitze, then head of the Policy Planning Staff in the State Department. Dated 14 April 1950 and signed by President Harry S. Truman on 30 September 1950, it laid out the basic public economic policies that the U.S. pursues to the present day.

In its conclusions, NSC-68 asserted: "One of the most significant lessons of our World War II experience was that the American economy, when it operates at a level approaching full efficiency, can provide enormous resources for purposes other than civilian consumption while simultaneously providing a high standard of living."

With this understanding, U.S. strategists began to build up a massive munitions industry, both to counter the military might of the Soviet Union (which they consistently overstated) and also to maintain full employment, as well as ward off a possible return of the depression. The result was that, under Pentagon leadership, entire new industries were created to manufacture large aircraft, nuclear-powered submarines, nuclear warheads, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and surveillance and communications satellites. This led to what President Eisenhower warned against in his farewell address of 6 February 1961: "The conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience" -- the military-industrial complex.

By 1990 the value of the weapons, equipment and factories devoted to the Department of Defense was 83% of the value of all plants and equipment in U.S. manufacturing. From 1947 to 1990, the combined U.S. military budgets amounted to $8.7 trillion. Even though the Soviet Union no longer exists, U.S. reliance on military Keynesianism has, if anything, ratcheted up, thanks to the massive vested interests that have become entrenched around the military establishment. Over time, a commitment to both guns and butter has proven an unstable configuration. Military industries crowd out the civilian economy and lead to severe economic weaknesses. Devotion to military Keynesianism is a form of slow economic suicide.

Higher spending, fewer jobs

On 1 May 2007, the Center for Economic and Policy Research of Washington, DC, released a study prepared by the economic and political forecasting company Global Insight on the long-term economic impact of increased military spending. Guided by economist Dean Baker, this research showed that, after an initial demand stimulus, by about the sixth year the effect of increased military spending turns negative. The U.S. economy has had to cope with growing defense spending for more than 60 years. Baker found that, after 10 years of higher defense spending, there would be 464,000 fewer jobs than in a scenario that involved lower defense spending.

Baker concluded: "It is often believed that wars and military spending increases are good for the economy. In fact, most economic models show that military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment."

These are only some of the many deleterious effects of military Keynesianism.

It was believed that the U.S. could afford both a massive military establishment and a high standard of living, and that it needed both to maintain full employment. But it did not work out that way. By the 1960s it was becoming apparent that turning over the nation's largest manufacturing enterprises to the Department of Defense and producing goods without any investment or consumption value was starting to crowd out civilian economic activities. The historian Thomas E Woods Jr. observes that, during the 1950s and 1960s, between one-third and two-thirds of all U.S. research talent was siphoned off into the military sector. It is, of course, impossible to know what innovations never appeared as a result of this diversion of resources and brainpower into the service of the military, but it was during the 1960s that we first began to notice Japan was outpacing us in the design and quality of a range of consumer goods, including household electronics and automobiles.

Can we reverse the trend?

Nuclear weapons furnish a striking illustration of these anomalies. Between the 1940s and 1996, the U.S. spent at least $5.8 trillion on the development, testing and construction of nuclear bombs. By 1967, the peak year of its nuclear stockpile, the U.S. possessed some 32,500 deliverable atomic and hydrogen bombs, none of which, thankfully, was ever used. They perfectly illustrate the Keynesian principle that the government can provide make-work jobs to keep people employed. Nuclear weapons were not just America's secret weapon, but also its secret economic weapon. As of 2006, we still had 9,960 of them. There is today no sane use for them, while the trillions spent on them could have been used to solve the problems of social security and health care, quality education and access to higher education for all, not to speak of the retention of highly-skilled jobs within the economy.

The pioneer in analyzing what has been lost as a result of military Keynesianism was the late Seymour Melman (1917-2004), a professor of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University. His 1970 book, Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War, was a prescient analysis of the unintended consequences of the U.S. preoccupation with its armed forces and their weaponry since the onset of the cold war. Melman wrote: "From 1946 to 1969, the United States government spent over $1,000bn on the military, more than half of this under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations -- the period during which the [Pentagon-dominated] state management was established as a formal institution. This sum of staggering size (try to visualize a billion of something) does not express the cost of the military establishment to the nation as a whole. The true cost is measured by what has been foregone, by the accumulated deterioration in many facets of life, by the inability to alleviate human wretchedness of long duration."

In an important exegesis on Melman's relevance to the current American economic situation, Thomas Woods writes: "According to the U.S. Department of Defense, during the four decades from 1947 through 1987 it used (in 1982 dollars) $7.62 trillion in capital resources. In 1985, the Department of Commerce estimated the value of the nation's plant and equipment, and infrastructure, at just over $7.29 trillion ... The amount spent over that period could have doubled the American capital stock or modernized and replaced its existing stock."

The fact that we did not modernize or replace our capital assets is one of the main reasons why, by the turn of the 21st century, our manufacturing base had all but evaporated. Machine tools, an industry on which Melman was an authority, are a particularly important symptom. In November 1968, a five-year inventory disclosed "that 64% of the metalworking machine tools used in U.S. industry were 10 years old or older. The age of this industrial equipment (drills, lathes, etc.) marks the United States' machine tool stock as the oldest among all major industrial nations, and it marks the continuation of a deterioration process that began with the end of the second world war. This deterioration at the base of the industrial system certifies to the continuous debilitating and depleting effect that the military use of capital and research and development talent has had on American industry."

Nothing has been done since 1968 to reverse these trends and it shows today in our massive imports of equipment -- from medical machines like proton accelerators for radiological therapy (made primarily in Belgium, Germany, and Japan) to cars and trucks.

Our short tenure as the world's lone superpower has come to an end. As Harvard economics professor Benjamin Friedman has written: "Again and again it has always been the world's leading lending country that has been the premier country in terms of political influence, diplomatic influence and cultural influence. It's no accident that we took over the role from the British at the same time that we took over the job of being the world's leading lending country. Today we are no longer the world's leading lending country. In fact we are now the world's biggest debtor country, and we are continuing to wield influence on the basis of military prowess alone."

Some of the damage can never be rectified. There are, however, some steps that the U.S. urgently needs to take. These include reversing Bush's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for the wealthy, beginning to liquidate our global empire of over 800 military bases, cutting from the defense budget all projects that bear no relationship to national security and ceasing to use the defense budget as a Keynesian jobs program.

If we do these things we have a chance of squeaking by. If we don't, we face probable national insolvency and a long depression.

CARACAS, Venezuela -- President Hugo Chavez said Sunday he will try to facilitate the release of three Americans held captive by Colombia's largest rebel group _ even though he has lost contact with the guerrillas.

Chavez confirmed his willingness to help a day after New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson said the socialist leader had agreed to mediate a possible exchange of the U.S. defense contractors for imprisoned guerrillas.

"I told him that we're at their service, to try to help even though the issue is very complicated," said Chavez, speaking during his weekly television and radio program.

Chavez helped pave the way for the release of six captives earlier this year. But on Sunday, he reiterated previous claims that his government has lost contact with leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

As the designated political heir of a deeply unpopular president — according to Gallup, President Bush has the highest disapproval rating recorded in 70 years of polling — John McCain should have little hope of winning in November. In fact, however, current polls show him roughly tied with either Democrat.

In part this may reflect the Democrats’ problems. For the most part, however, it probably reflects the perception, eagerly propagated by Mr. McCain’s many admirers in the news media, that he’s very different from Mr. Bush — a responsible guy, a straight talker.

But is this perception at all true? During the 2000 campaign people said much the same thing about Mr. Bush; those of us who looked hard at his policy proposals, especially on taxes, saw the shape of things to come.

And a look at what Mr. McCain says about taxes shows the same combination of irresponsibility and double-talk that, back in 2000, foreshadowed the character of the Bush administration.

The McCain tax plan contains three main elements.

First, Mr. McCain proposes making almost all of the Bush tax cuts, which are currently scheduled to expire at the end of 2010, permanent. (He proposes reinstating the inheritance tax, albeit at a very low rate.)

Second, he wants to eliminate the alternative minimum tax, which was originally created to prevent the wealthy from exploiting tax loopholes, but has begun to hit the upper middle class.

Third, he wants to sharply reduce tax rates on corporate profits.

According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the overall effect of the McCain tax plan would be to reduce federal revenue by more than $5 trillion over 10 years. That’s a lot of revenue loss — enough to pose big problems for the government’s solvency.

But before I get to that, let’s look at what I found truly revealing: the McCain campaign’s response to the Tax Policy Center’s assessment. The response, written by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the former head of the Congressional Budget Office, criticizes the center for adopting “unrealistic Congressional budgeting conventions.” What’s that about?

Well, Congress “scores” tax legislation by comparing estimates of the revenue that would be collected if the legislation passed with estimates of the revenue that would be collected under current law. In this case that means comparing the McCain plan with what would happen if the Bush tax cuts expired on schedule.

But here’s the thing: the reason the Bush tax cuts are set to expire is that the Bush administration engaged in a game of deception. It put an expiration date on the tax cuts, which it never intended to honor, as a way to hide those tax cuts’ true cost.

The McCain campaign wants us to accept the success of that deception as a fact of life. Mr. Holtz-Eakin is saying, in effect, “We’re not engaged in any new irresponsibility — we’re just perpetuating the Bush administration’s irresponsibility. That doesn’t count.”

It’s the sort of fiscal double-talk that has been a Bush administration hallmark. In any case, it offers no answer to the principal point raised by the Tax Policy Center analysis, which has nothing to do with scoring: the McCain tax plan would leave the federal government with far too little revenue to cover its expenses, leading to huge budget deficits unless there were deep cuts in spending.

And Mr. McCain has said nothing realistic about how he would close the giant budget gap his tax cuts would produce — a gap so large that eliminating it would require cutting Social Security benefits by three-quarters, eliminating Medicare, or something equivalently drastic. Talking, as Mr. Holtz-Eakin does, about fighting waste and reforming procurement doesn’t cut it.

Now, Mr. McCain isn’t unique in making promises he has no way to pay for — the same can be said, to some extent, of the Democratic candidates. But Mr. McCain’s plan is far more irresponsible than anything the Democrats are proposing, and the difference in degree is so large as to be a difference in kind. Mr. McCain’s budget talk simply doesn’t make sense.

So what are Mr. McCain’s real intentions?

If truth be told, the McCain tax plan doesn’t seem to embody any coherent policy agenda. Instead, it looks like a giant exercise in pandering — an attempt to mollify the G.O.P.’s right wing, and never mind if it makes any sense.

The impression that Mr. McCain’s tax talk is all about pandering is reinforced by his proposal for a summer gas tax holiday — a measure that would, in fact, do little to help consumers, although it would boost oil industry profits.

More and more, Mr. McCain sounds like a man who will say anything to become president.

In 1952, when McCarthyism was at its height, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas labeled the investigative techniques of the junior senator from Wisconsin “guilt by association” (Alder v. Board of Education). Douglas added that McCarthyite tactics were “repugnant to our society” because, despite the absence of any overt wrongdoing, the pasts of those attacked were “combed for signs of disloyalty” and for utterances that might be read as “clues to dangerous thoughts.”

More than a half century later, “McCarthyism” was joined in the lexicon by “Swiftboating,” the art of the smear campaign mounted with the intention not of documenting a wrong, but of covering the victim with slime enough to cast doubt on his or her integrity. Now, in 2008, after a primary season increasingly marked by dirty pool and low blows, “McCarthyism” and “Swiftboating” have come together in a particularly lethal and despicable form. I refer to the startling revelation — proclaimed from the housetops by both the Clinton and McCain campaigns — that Barack Obama ate dinner at William Ayers’s house, served with him on a board and was the honored guest at a reception he organized.

Confession time. I too have eaten dinner at Bill Ayers’s house (more than once), and have served with him on a committee, and he was one of those who recruited my wife and me at a reception when we were considering positions at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Moreover, I have had Bill and his wife Bernardine Dohrn to my apartment, was a guest lecturer in a course he taught and joined in a (successful) effort to persuade him to stay at UIC and say no to an offer from Harvard. Of course, I’m not running for anything, but I do write for The New York Times and, who knows, this association with former fugitive members of the Weathermen might be enough in the eyes of some to get me canned.

Did I conspire with Bill Ayers? Did I help him build bombs? Did I aid and abet his evasion (for a time) of justice? Not likely, given that at the time of the events that brought Ayers and Dohrn to public attention, I was a supporter of the Vietnam War. I haven’t asked him to absolve me of that sin (of which I have since repented), and he hasn’t asked me to forgive him for his (if he has any).

Indeed in all the time I spent with Ayers and Dohrn, politics — present or past — never came up.

What did come up? To answer that question I have to introduce a word and concept that is somewhat out of fashion: the salon. A salon is a gathering in a private home where men and women from various walks of life engage in conversation about any number of things, including literature, business, fashion, films, education and philosophy. Ayers and Dohrn did not call their gatherings salons, but that’s what they were; large dinner parties (maybe 12-15), with guests coming and going, one conversation leading to another, no rules or obligations, except the obligation to be interesting and interested. The only thing I don’t remember was ideology, although since this was all going on in Hyde Park, there was the general and diffused ideology, vaguely liberal, that usually hangs over a university town.

Many of those attending these occasions no doubt knew something about their hosts’ past, but the matter was never discussed and why should it have been? We were there not because of what Ayers and Dohrn had done 40 years ago, but because of what they were doing at the moment.

Ayers is a longtime professor of education at UIC, nationally known for his prominence in the “small school” movement. Dohrn teaches at Northwestern Law School, where she directs a center for child and family justice. Both lend their skills and energies to community causes; both advise various agencies; together they have raised exemplary children and they have been devoted caretakers to aged parents. “Respectable” is too mild a word to describe the couple; rock-solid establishment would be more accurate. There was and is absolutely no reason for anyone who knows them to plead the fifth or declare, “I am not now nor have I ever been a friend of Bill’s and Bernardine’s.”

Least of all Barack Obama, who by his own account didn’t know them that well and is now being taken to task for having known them at all. Of course it would have required preternatural caution to avoid associating with anyone whose past deeds might prove embarrassing on the chance you decided to run for president someday. In an earlier column, I spoke of the illogic of holding a candidate accountable for things said or done by a supporter or an acquaintance. Now a candidate is being held accountable for things said and done four decades ago by people who happen to live in his upper middle class neighborhood.

Hillary Clinton and John McCain should know better. In fact, they do know better. To date, Clinton has played hardball, but hasn’t really fouled. I never saw anything wrong or inaccurate about her saying that Martin Luther King’s vision required a president’s action before it could be implemented, or Bill Clinton’s saying that Jesse Jackson won the South Carolina primary twice. He did, and if the implication was that Obama’s base constituency is African-American, that too was accurate and continues to be so.

As for her saying that all Obama had ever done was give a speech, she was being generous: he gave that speech against invading Iraq at a small event featuring other speakers (including Jackson); the local press coverage did not even mention him; and if this was, as his campaign claims, an act of courage, it was a singularly private one, maybe even a fairy tale. Clinton’s exaggerating the danger of her visit to Bosnia (most likely unintentional because, as she said, “I’m not dumb”) came a little closer to crossing a line, but didn’t. Re-telling a story (about a hospital’s refusal to treat an uninsured patient) that turned out not to be true was evidence of faulty campaign organization, not of deliberate duplicity.

But the literature the Clinton campaign is passing around about Obama and Ayers cannot be explained away or rationalized. It features bold heads proclaiming that Ayers doesn’t regret his Weathermen activities (what does that have to do with Obama? Are we required to repudiate things acquaintances of our have not said?), that Ayers contributed $200 to Obama’s senatorial campaign (do you take money only from people of whose every action you approve?), that Obama admired Ayers’s 1997 book on the juvenile justice system, that Ayers and Obama participated on a panel examining the role of intellectuals in public life. That subversive event was sponsored by The Center for Public Intellectuals, an organization that also sponsored an evening conversation (moderated by me) between those notorious radicals Richard Rorty and Judge Richard Posner (also a neighbor of Ayers’s; maybe the Federalist Society should expel him).

I don’t see any crimes or even misdemeanors in any of this. I do see civic activism and a concern for the welfare of children. The suggestion that something sinister was transpiring on those occasions is backed up by nothing except the four-alarm-bell typography that accompanies this list of entirely innocent, and even praiseworthy, actions.

As for Senator McCain, in 2004 he repudiated the Swiftboat attacks against fellow veteran John Kerry, but this time around he’s joining in, and if Obama gets the nomination, it seems that the Arizona senator will be playing the Ayers card. Of course, McCain knows a little about baseless accusations and innuendos, given his experience in South Carolina in 2000. And in case he has forgotten what it feels like, he may soon be reminded; for there’s a story abroad on the Internet that says that rather than being a heroic, tortured prisoner of war, McCain was a collaborator who traded information for a comfortable apartment serviced by maids who were really prostitutes. I don’t believe it for a second, just as I am sure that Senators McCain and Clinton don’t really believe that Obama condones setting bombs or supports a radical agenda that was pursued (as he has said) when he was eight years old.

The difference is that I feel a little dirty just for having repeated a scurrilous rumor even as I rejected it. Apparently Obama’s two opponents have no such qualms and are happily retailing, and wallowing in, the dirt.

Sunday, April 27, 2008

You may not know who Tony Zirkle (1) is, but you're about to find out. Elsewhere, George W. Bush (2,6) shakes his booty, John McCain (3,5) demonstrates his leadership qualities, and John Ashcroft (10) explains torture.